The Old Thief is Dead, Hail To The Thief!
There’s little left to say of Radiohead’s OK Computer.
It’s certainly not a radical pivot, even within Radiohead’s own catalogue, but the modern angst that runs through that album has made it something of a flagship record. It’s oft-invoked as an example of great prescience, taking the issues of the day and extrapolating them into nightmarish visions of a cruel and soulless dystopia. There are certainly shades of that cold blue palette in our tech-heavy day-to-day, but whilst OK Computer proved a bold forecast, it’s since been dethroned as their most exact prediction.
Hail To The Thief, the band’s sixth effort, arrived in mid-2003, cloaked in a political mantra and mired in the spaces between their previous efforts. Jonny’s guitars meshed with Thom’s electronica, synthesising elements of Kid A and their more traditional alt-rock origins. It channeled the same style of systematic critiques as OK Computer, albeit using a more contemporary sentiment to underpin the frustration, resignation and panic that runs throughout.
In spite of the incendiary tagline, Radiohead’s Bush-indebted title levels that critique at any such leader – the problem didn’t start with W., and it definitely didn’t end with his departure. The enthusiastically angry record has aged into a regrettable prescience, the duplicitous rhetoric of The War on Terror both a timely mirror and an inadvertent looking glass. Hail To The Thief deals in distortion, deception and doctored realities, but what was once dystopian now feels domesticated.
Baghdad by Stanley Donwood
Hail To The Thief was not made with prescience in mind – if anything, it was quite the opposite. A reluctant response to US politics at the dawn of the War on Terror, the album is as timely a record as Radiohead has ever released, mired in a political reality that ensued even as they toured it. The phrase itself, “Hail to the Thief,” was coined in the wake of the 2000 election, which was decided in one of the most contentious recounts in American history. A simple subversion of the longtime Presidential anthem, the jab cut to the core of America’s political identity, breaking sharply with the sentiment of the oft-unsung lyrics:
“Hail to the Chief we have chosen for the nation,
Hail to the Chief! We salute him, one and all.
Hail to the Chief, as we pledge cooperation
In proud fulfilment of a great, noble call…”
“It was a formative moment,” said Yorke on first hearing the phrase. “One evening on the radio, way before we were doing the record. The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged and how Bush was being called a thief.” The very nature of the “we” who had “chosen for the nation” was in question, but as the band moved into a Los Angeles studio in 2002, the “great, noble cause” of George W. Bush’s presidency was becoming apparent – and, strangely, it came as a surprise.
Bush Jr., breaking with the approach of then-president Bill Clinton, had run on a platform that fused internationalism and isolationism. It appealed to disparate factions within his party, and set him apart from Democratic candidate Al Gore, a staunch advocate of American intervention abroad. “We can’t be all things to all people in the world,” said Bush in the second Presidential debate. “I am worried about over-committing our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. I don’t think nation-building missions are worthwhile.” He defended Clinton’s hesitation in Rwanda, itself a reaction to the Black Hawk Down incident, and framed the United States as a force that should “empower,” not “tell people what to do.” Bush rode this decidedly insular foreign policy to a dubious victory, but eight months after his inauguration, everything changed.
On the evening of September 11, Radiohead were slated to play the Wuhlheide Park Amphitheatre in Berlin. They took to the stage on that rainy evening, the news of the day weighing on both the band and the audience alike. It took eight songs – thirty-eight minutes – for Yorke to mention 9/11, and even as he did, he struggled for words. “I’m trying not to say anything. Well, what the fuck are you going to say after today? You know. There’s absolutely nothing to say.” Five tracks later, in the wake of “Pyramid Song,” he explained the situation as best he could – it was but mid-afternoon in NYC, and the confusion was only amplified in a time before smartphones. Damian Fowler, a New Yorker at that fateful show, recalls Thom’s final segue: “This is hoping … George W Bush doesn’t declare world war three.”
He didn’t, but that’s not for a lack of trying. Radiohead wouldn’t return with new music until June of 2003, the 21-months between that foreboding comment and their larger artistic statement spent touring, recording and caring for their young families. In September 2002, the band moved into Ocean Way Recording in Los Angeles at the behest of producer Nigel Godrich, who insisted it would be “a good change of scenery.” That’s not to say it was a distraction: as hawkish rhetoric took hold in both the States and the UK, the band couldn’t escape the dull thud of the war drum. It didn’t do much to temper their spirits. “It was very fast moving and very fruitful,” recalled Godrich ten years on. “We were aiming to do a track a day, and we kind of did it.” They returned home, worked out the kinks, and the record was largely finished by February of 2003. In late March, the long-gestating Invasion of Iraq began.
On May 1, George W. Bush declared the invasion complete, spouting jingoistic platitudes from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He arrived in a two-person navy jet, posing for photos in his flight suit and presenting as, in the words of a former speechwriter-turned-journalist, “'hot' as in virile, sexy and powerful.” An infamous banner unfurled across the bridge read ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,’ that generic phrase now tarred by a standout delusion from a career defined by them. In typical fashion, that fleeting moment of flag-waving coherence was heralded by prominent media outlets as a powerful display of presidential demeanour.
The presidential demeanour, like the “accomplished” mission it serviced, was a fiction. In the hours beforehand, at a conference in Kabul, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan – another lofty lie. It was these fabrications, beamed into car radios and filtered through cable punditry, that shaped Yorke’s mind in the months following that Berlin show. Hail To The Thief isn’t a record about the 2000 election, nor is it a condemnation of George W. Bush or the then-impending Iraq War: it’s a searing critique of a lie, one which begat mistruths, falsities, fabrications and – ultimately – hundreds of thousands of lives. It’s a lie that reigns to this day, more powerful than ever before: the lie of accountability.
If the title trades in forthright stock phrases, the music of Hail To The Thief finds ferocity in sharp critiques of hazy figures, the sins of a vague Administration shorthand for an entire cultural moment. It opens with 2 + 2 = 5, a slow-building explosion of anger and discontent underwritten by George Orwell’s dystopian visions. In the decade leading to 1984, Orwell wrote on the nature of the Nazi government, which “denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists.” This insistence leads to an executive which “controls not only the future but the past… if he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”
Yorke’s telling equates this indoctrination with a lack of action, the cultivation of ignorance acting as a powerful sedative. “I'll stay home forever / Where two and two always makes a five,” he sings, denigrating the “dreamer” as the world slips further and further into an irredeemable bind. “Anger is an energy source for me, especially lyrically when I’m presented with something I consider utter madness,” he told Paste Magazine in 2006. “My writing is a constant response to doublethink” he added, namechecking that Orwellian mode of control: part indoctrination, part gaslighting. It makes sense that the track would be the very first they recorded during the sessions, with Jonny’s guitar plugging in at the open. It’s energetic, inelegant and absolutely furious, like a moment of uncontrollable catharsis.
2 + 2 = 5 builds to a belated realisation, though that moment of lucidity is overshadowed by an explosion of discontent, the furious refrain of “you have not been paying attention” stressing the dangers of propaganda and the politics of complacency. It’s a sentiment made clear in the track’s subtitle, The Lukewarm, which makes reference to Dante’s Inferno. In that guided tour of hell, the Italian poet describes “the lukewarm” as “neither hot nor cold but tepid, and therefore more contemptible than the worst of sinners.” Thom takes some poetic license too, defining those same fence-sitters as “the people who don’t give a fuck … The lukewarm are on the edge of the Inferno, cruising around near the gates but they can’t actually get out. They’re like, ‘What are we doing here? We didn’t do anything at all.’ And in Dante’s eyes it’s, ‘That’s exactly why you’re here. You did fuck all. You just let it happen.’”
Sit Down, Stand Up, another track which runs from eerie to explosive, pulls from both the musicianship of Mingus and the spectre of “Rwanda, watching that on TV,” referring to either the brutal 1994 genocide or ensuing Congo Wars. The visceral depiction of the conflict, beamed into living rooms across the world, shows people “walk into the jaws of hell” – both in the vicious episodes of post-colonial violence and the indifferent response to the bloodshed. The jaws of hell welcome sinners, but it’s just within that the lukewarm sit, without conviction and beyond salvation.
Sail To The Moon ponders the possibility of generational change, whilst Backdrifts examines “the slide backwards that's happening everywhere you look” atop a skittish, glitchy groove. “There was a time when everybody sort of felt like maybe the world was progressing, and maybe we were getting better, sort of understanding other people,” Yorke explained in the Hail To The Thief interview CD. A placated public is then cryptically probed on Go to Sleep, a track adorned with a telling subtitle: Little Man Being Erased.
Where I End And You Begin, a product of Thom’s want to write a ‘love song,’ even manages to incorporate themes of deception, individuality and assimilation. Society takes on a sacrificial slant in We Suck Young Blood, and on The Gloaming – at one point, the title track – Yorke says your alarm bells “should be ringing,” the phrase becoming a neutered mantra as it bludgeons deaf ears. It’s not long before another warning goes unheeded: the CAN-inspired There, There warns “there's always a siren singing you to shipwreck,” soon conceding that “we are accidents waiting to happen.”
Yorke revisits the bunker – a key image of Idioteque – on I Will, musing over what he does control: the wellbeing of his son, fresh-faced in a cruel world. It’s for him that he makes his last stand, with Wolf At The Door pitting an innocent instrumental against flashes of kicked teeth, slit throats, steel cap boots and taxmen. It’s a song for the people subjugated by those who are meant to represent their interests, a sharp distinction illustrated in the space between “city boys in first class” and the “someone else [who’s] gonna come and clean it up, born and raised for the job.” The line between have and have not is no longer a designation: it’s the difference between indifference and hypervigilance, the break between the luxury of being carefree and the suffering of constant stress.
“Suddenly I was like 'wow, this is pretty bitter stuff,’ you know, all the stuff about 'cold wives and mistresses, cold wives and Sunday papers, city boys in first class,’ all that stuff,” said Thom in 2003, surprised at the seething tone of his own haphazard lyrics. “I was like 'bloody hell, that's pretty serious'. I guess it's just very, very angry, cause I couldn't help it, really.”
Manhattan by Stanley Donwood
That anger, like the case for the war itself, came on surreptitiously. Radiohead were in the midst of the Thief sessions when the September Dossier was presented to the British Parliament, the document foundational to Blair’s case for war. The scrutiny levelled at those documents couldn’t undo the power of their implications, and Blair’s foreword contained the incendiary allegation that Saddam’s “military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.”
Tabloid papers, frequent targets of Yorke’s ire, ran with headlines that channeled that truly alarmist fearmongering. “Brits 45 mins from doom,” announced The Sun on their front-page; “Mad Saddam ready to attack: 45 minutes from a chemical war,” amplified the Daily Star. The “Brits” in question were purportedly troops in Cyprus, and The Sun’s headline – a misrepresentation of an unexposed lie – sowed panic amongst their vast audience, with daily circulation rates well in excess of 3 million. You could call it manufactured consent, and Thom probably would: “Chomsky is a hero of mine,” he said in October 2004. “I can’t believe that anyone has a brain that size and can lift his head up.”
That’s not to say there wasn’t resistance: at the same time as tabloid fanned the flames of fear, activists poured into the streets in response to Blair’s September Dossier. London Mayor Ken Livingston was moved by the 150,000-strong crowd, telling the BBC it represented “the largest march for peace I have seen in 30 years” and predicting it would “have an electrifying effect on the Labour Party conference and on those MPs opposed to war.”
A growing international sentiment hit Australia, with the worldwide protests of 15 February 2003 drawing – by conservative counts – 150,000 in Melbourne alone. It was a stirring display for critics of Howard’s hawkish perspective, with Bob Brown calling the march “a huge statement by the people of Melbourne, and the people of Australia to John Howard - that he's gone the wrong way and should turn around.” It was two days later that The New York Times argued for the emergence of a new polar struggle between two superpowers: “the United States and world public opinion.” The struggle was short-lived, and the United States had their war.
Hail To The Thief was never about that ‘victory’ – it was about the means that ultimately facilitated it, from the post-9/11 fear, the press that frequently stoked it and the lies that made for fuel. The record endures because of Thom’s fiercely introspective pen, one which fitfully illustrates his inner crises whilst offering vague sketches of the forces that bear down on him. It’s a commentary filtered through the tortured psyche of a subject, bombarded with headlines, pundits, politicians, clashes, controversies and calls to arms. “These new songs, they’re not so much songs about politics as me desperately struggling to keep politics out,” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “If I could have written about anything else, I would have. I tried fucking hard. But how can any sensible person ignore what’s been going on all together? I couldn’t, I really couldn’t. Fuck, man, I would love to write a lyric free of politics!”
There’s no opting out of the political. The result is a record that finds an increasingly alienated citizen flailing against his own irrelevance, beholden to the whims of a system that’s supposedly predicated on his input. An incorrigible executive and an irresponsible press, preying on fears with misinformation and deceit, had whipped a nation into a vengeful fury that transcended partisan politics. “The thing that keeps me awake at night is that my particular government is not answerable to the population,” said Yorke in Rolling Stone a fortnight after the release. “The majority of British people were not into this war, yet it still occurred, and it didn’t matter what we said. It is the theater of the absurd.”
Special Sauce, 100 x 100 cm (393⁄8 x 393⁄8 in.), acrylic on canvas, 2003 © Stanley Donwood
There was no mention of Hail To The Thief in the June 10 edition of The New York Times, which was instead absorbed with the ever-unfurling veracity of the weapons of mass destruction. That’s hardly surprising – the idea that a president and his administration could have knowingly falsified just cause outraged the third of the country who believed it, though Bush’s contemporaneous approval rating nonetheless climbed to 71%.
The war would unravel for the next decade, with 2015’s Iraq Inquiry producing The Chilcot Report, “an unprecedented, devastating indictment” of Blair’s actions. The report could hardly be more damning, and the effects could barely be lesser: after leaving hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, creating a vicious power vacuum in the Middle East, destabilising a region that remains a quagmire and kickstarting an unwinnable war, Blair earned a book deal, flourished in the private sector and started the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
He was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian honour bestowed in recognition of “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors,” in the final week of Bush Jr.’s second term. John Howard was also honoured in the same ceremony. Bush hailed those Iraq allies as “the sort of guys who look you in the eye, keep their word, and tell the truth.” Increasingly dubious though that was, the continued commitment to a series of lies not only stained the legacy of those three leaders – it presaged the rise of post-truth politics.
In April of this year, The Washington Post updated its rolling count of the President’s lies, logging “18,000 false or misleading claims” over the course of 1,170 days in office. That’s a little more than 15 false claims a day over little less than three-and-a-quarter years. In 2008, a report from the Center for Public Integrity claimed Bush and his eight closest aides – including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney – made 935 false claims about Iraq in the two years following 9/11. Trump alone could run these numbers in an average of 62 days.
Even a cursory search will turn up troves of reporting devoted to cataloguing and explaining these deceptions, but these pages amount to a shrine for nothing: if a swathe of baldfaced lies can’t raise alarm, what’s 18,000 falsities – delivered in handfuls – going to do? If such rampant dishonesty were a dealbreaker, we’d never have made it this far. Hail To The Thief was Radiohead’s most pointed rebuke of doublethink, but it presaged an age of unimaginable deceit, antagonism and resignation.
The United States is still grappling with the consequences of the lies that started their most protracted war, but less than two decades on from the climate that produced Hail To The Thief, the truth is more elusive than ever. Lies are more pervasive, but they’re no less dangerous, and complacency is fostered through brute force and fact fatigue. In a world where deliberate distortions earn praise instead of condemnation, truth is but a needless inconvenience.
”The people in charge, globally, are maniacs,” said Thom to a shocked MTV crew in 2003. “They are maniacs, and they, unless we sort it out, are gonna deprive us of a future.”